Just a little blog about me and mine.

Las Vegas-Day Three May 21, 2009

We slept until noon on our 3rd full day in Las Vegas, that’s 3pm Atlanta time if you are keeping count. It’s now becoming more clear to me now why I’ve been dragging in the mornings and having a hard time going to sleep at night now that I’m back on a regular schedule this week.

After that nice rest, our first adventure for the day was finding somewhere to eat. On our first trip to Vegas we didn’t eat at any of the hotel buffets, even though that’s sort of something the city is known for. Our hotel has one of the ones most often mentioned in tour guides, and the buffet is divided into the different regions of France with foods from that region. Overall, it was a pretty good meal and was cool to try some new things that we wouldn’t normally try if we would be stuck with a whole plate of it at a restaurant.

We then headed out to the pool for some reading and sun. It was really hot by the pool-that whole desert thing and all, so we swam a bit, and found the pool was freezing. Go figure. It was a really nice pool area with tons of chairs and a great view.

Even with our SPF 45 we were starting to burn really quickly, which is kind of sad and pathetic, but we know how pale we are so we went back inside.

Once inside, we both decided that we were thirsty and craving actual Coca Cola products. I’ve mostly talked about the things I like about Las Vegas, but I should mention something I hate about the city–almost every restaurant and hotel in the entire city has Pepsi and not Coke. This sad fact is right on the top of the list with the other things I hate about Vegas, too much cigarette smoke and people hired to stand on the street and hand out tons of cards trying to get you to get hookers and strippers.

Three days in a Pepsi-filled world might be even worse than solicitation of prostitution in my opinion, so luckily there is a giant Coca-Cola store on the Strip that even has a giant Coke Bottle shaped store front. We needed to make a pilgrimage since we were so far from home. They have a tasting menu of some of the drinks from around the world, like they do at the Coke museum here in Atlanta, and also on their menu is a tasting sampler of different ice cream floats. Luckily the floats are all made with Coke products like Fanta orange that you’d actually want to drink-unlike the tasting menu which does in fact have the school field trip favorite Beverly on it–for $7 or so (actually a great price in my opinion).

That night we had tickets to the 10:30 show of Jubilee–one of Las Vegas’ classic showgirl performances. We had a pre-show dinner at Samba, a Brazilian steakhouse. This was our first Brazilian steakhouse experience with rodizio, and it was a fun meal. The meal starts with salads (and a pitcher of Sangria for us too), and then you get several plates of side dishes for your table to share, including fried plantains which was pretty much the only side we ate since the main part of the meal is a wide variety of grilled meats. On the table is a little wooden salt-shaker like thing with a green end and a red end. If you flip it to green, the waiter continues to bring you different samples of the grilled meats. When you flip it to red they take a break until they see that you’ve flipped it back to green. There were 8 different meats on the menu and they bring them out in random order. We pretty much took one or two bites of each to try it, but even that was a ton of food.

On to the show… Bally’s Jubilee is probably what you think of when you think of Vegas showgirls. Topless, yes, but tasteful with those enormous headdresses and elaborate costumes with jewels and feathers. That part of the show is pretty much just the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes though, and it was very cool. The rest of the show though is much more like numbers from the Lawrence Welk show. There was a song and dance number about the Titanic (at one point I wanted to lean over to PL and say, “so does everyone’s top come off when the ship hits the iceberg but restrained myself).

In addition to showgirls, Jubilee also features a number of male singers and dancers (all clearly gay which was sort of funny since the girls are topless and they just could care less). They do a non-topless show once a week so families can go, but the topless parts were all much more about the costumes and not sexualized or trashy. There was a song/dance thing somewhere in the middle about the story of Samson and Delilah and it totally creeped us both out and was both bizarre and kind of dirty with S&M overtones. Some parts of the show are very out-dated, but parts of it like the fact that each enormously elaborate costume was different, were really cool. Our final verdict is that we were glad we went, but glad we didn’t pay full price for tickets and think the show’s days are numbered.